What California knows about Kamala Harris

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More than any other presidential candidate, Kamala Harris’ biography is singularly Californian.

Born and bussed to school in Berkeley, tested by San Francisco’s cut-throat municipal politics and propelled onto the national stage as the state’s top law enforcement officer and then its first female senator of color, Harris’ approach to politics and policymaking were honed here.

What most Americans are still just beginning to learn about California’s junior senator—the particulars of her political pedigree, her record on criminal justice, her reputation as (depending on your point of view) a pragmatic or an over-cautious political figure—we’ve seen it here for decades.

Here are some ways that California shaped Kamala Harris and that Harris has shaped California.

1. Harris was born and raised in the Golden State

In a state full of transplants, Harris is a lifelong Californian.

Harris was born in 1964 at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland—a little over a mile from city hall where, more than half a century later, she would announce her bid for the presidency. She spent her childhood in Berkeley during the city’s Free Speech Movement. Both of her parents were immigrants who met while getting their PhDs and protesting for civil rights at UC Berkeley. Harris’ father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was from India. The couple split when Harris was seven and Harris and her sister Maya were raised mostly by her mother. Gopalan died in 2009.

In the first Democratic presidential debate this year, Harris famously skewered former Vice President Joe Biden for his past opposition to federally-mandated busing to desegregate public schools. For Harris, she said, the issue was “personal.”

Specifically, Harris rode the “red rooster” from Berkeley’s working-class flatlands to Thousand Oaks Elementary School at the base of the affluent north Berkeley hills.

This was 1969, just one year after Berkeley Unified introduced its “two-way” busing program across its elementary schools. Berkeley being Berkeley, unlike local integration plans across the country, the city had undertaken this one on its own accord.

Traversing back and forth between different strata of society—black, white and Asian; well-off and working-class—is a familiar trope in Harris’ biography.

“It wasn’t a homogenous life,” said Debbie Mesloh, a friend who has also worked for Harris as a communication director and a consultant. “She’s a very resourceful person in that she can move in between these worlds.”

Harris spent her teenage years in Montreal, moving there with her sister and mother when Gopalan accepted a university research position there. She earned a political science and economics degree at Howard University in Washington D.C. but returned to California to get her law degree in 1989 at the University of California, Hastings in San Francisco.

She’s called California home ever since.

Fresh out of law school, she joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1990, serving there eight years before crossing the bay to San Francisco. In 2003, she unexpectedly won election as San Francisco District Attorney, where she served two terms before her narrow election as state Attorney General in 2010. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.

2. The influence of San Francisco king (and queen) maker Willie Brown

Former state Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown has helped accelerate many a successful political career in California (including that of current Gov. Gavin Newsom). Harris got a boost from Brown too.

In March 1994, San Francisco Chronicle’s legendary columnist Herb Caen described the scene at Brown’s surprise 60th birthday party. Clint Eastwood was there, wrote Caen, and he “spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris.” In his column, Caen described Harris, then a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, as “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.”

The relationship ended after two years, but her connection to Brown, three decades her senior, did have an outsized effect on her career.

“I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie,” John Burton, who used to be president pro tem of the state Senate, former chair of the California Democratic Party and a San Francisco political powerhouse in his own right, told Politico recently.

The Speaker gave Harris a couple plum positions on two state regulatory boards—the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. “If you were asked to be on a board that regulated medical care, would you say no?” Harris told SFWeekly a few years later.

Harris’ connection to Brown also helped her make connections across San Francisco high-society and California political elite. In 1996, a year after Brown became mayor and Harris broke off the relationship, she joined the board of trustees at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Fun fact: a few years later, she dated the talk show host Montel Williams.)

When Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney nearly a decade later, her first contribution came from Elaine McKeon, chair of the museum’s board. More—much more—poured in from donors with last names like Fisher, Getty, Buell, Haas, and other noble houses of the Bay Area.

But from the beginning of her political career, Harris has seen her connection with Brown as a liability—a cudgel that opponents can use against her and, at worst, a tired, sexist trope used to question the legitimacy of her ascendant career. In the first run for office to become San Francisco’s District Attorney, Harris deliberately hired a campaign consultant known for working with clients outside the Brown political machine. During that same campaign, she described her past relationship with the former Speaker and Mayor as “an albatross hanging around my neck.”

3. A lack of clarity

You’re seeing it now in the presidential race. As the New York Times put it recently: “the content of her message remains a work in progress.” We saw it before in California.

While running the California Department of Justice, Harris was often loath to wade into the political battles taking place just a few blocks away in the state Legislature.

There was the bill that would have required her office to investigate police shootings. She did not take a formal position (though she did tell a reporter it would be bad policy). The bill died.

There was the proposal to force police departments to gather data on the ethnicity and race of the civilians they stop. Harris also declined to take a position. It passed anyway.

And on the biggest criminal justice overhaul in California in a generation, Harris also kept mum.

Please turn to Record-Bee.com to read more about candidate Harris and her race for President in 2020.